In early 2015 Shoshana Magnet, associate professor at the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa, came to speak to CSSD’s working group on Science and Social Difference about her feminist analysis of recent scientific inquiry into mixed societies of robots and insects.

Keywords event on "trans," featuring Jack Halberstam, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California; Yvette Christiansë, Professor of English and Africana Studies, Barnard College; Jack Pula, Instructor of Psychiatry, College of Physicians & Surgeons, Columbia University and Chairperson of the Transgender Committee, Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists; and Yasmine Ergas, Co-Chair of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies Council, Director of Gender & Public Policy Specialization, and Lecturer in Discipline of International and Public Affairs, SIPA. Moderated by Jean Howard, George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities and Chair, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University.

Caribbean Queer Visualities, co-sponsored by the CCSD working group the Digital Black Atlantic Project, reflects on and stimulates the production of creative and critical work that takes seriously the emergence of heterodox personal and public identities, identities that breach or subvert or evade the heteronormativities of colonial and postcolonial modes of being and self-expression.

Over the course of this afternoon of multiform panel presentations, we will engage critically with the digital as praxis, reflecting on the challenges and opportunities presented by the media technologies that evermore intensely reconfigure the social, historical, and geo-political contours of the Caribbean and its diasporas. Presenters will consider the affordances and limitations of the digital with respect to their particular methodologies – notably, representing the past, historicizing space, and telling stories.

Social Justice after the Welfare State, a workshop led by Alice Kessler-Harris and Premilla Nadasen in the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) at Columbia, hosts a daylong symposium to explore the transformation of the welfare state and social movements in the face of neoliberal challenges. We consider the implications of this transformation for the political economy of class, gender, racism, and migration.

Over the course of the twentieth century in the United States and Europe, the social bargaining process we call welfare integrated capital and labor in ways that had a profound impact on political participation and legitimacy. Examining social policy and citizenship in a comparative framework, Christian Lammert, professor for North American Politics at the John F. Kennedy Institute of the Free University of Berlin, will speak to the relationship between welfare and democracy—a question central to contemporary transatlantic debates surrounding capitalism, austerity, and inequality.